Columbia-based cybersecurity firm Tenable tops U.S. IPOs for the third quarter

Cybersecurity is not only a growing issue, it’s big business — so big that Tenable, a Columbia-based firm in the field, had the largest initial public stock offering of any U.S. company in the third quarter, according to a new report.

Tenable, which sells software tools to corporations to ward off hackers, sold about 12 percent of the company to the public in July, raising about $288 million. Its shares sold for $23 and have traded higher since, reaching a high of $38.88 on Sept. 28. The stock is currently trading around $28.

The IPO valued the company at $2.1 billion, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and CB Insights.

The firm’s IPO topped those of two San Francisco e-commerce companies, Funding Circle and Eventbrite, which were valued at $1.9 billion and $1.7 billion respectively. The Cambridge, Mass., drug development company Rubius Therapeutics was valued at $1.7 billion in its IPO and the Santa Barbara consumer electronics company Sonos came in at $1.5 billion in the third quarter, the report said.

These initial public offerings came as venture capitalists pour money into U.S. companies. VC-backed companies saw funding increase 17 percent to $28 billion in the third quarter, the report found.

Maryland saw 21 venture capital deals for a total of $251.3 million in the July-to-September quarter, the PricewaterhouseCoopers report found. That’s up 35 percent from $185.7 million invested in 16 deals in the same quarter of 2017.

The biggest deals included $80 million invested in Sonatype, a Fulton-based software firm, $36 million in Neuraly, a Germantown biotechnoloy firm that grew out of research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and $33 million in Facet Wealth, a Baltimore-based firm offering technology-enabled financial planning services.

While Maryland showed growth, the value of deals in Baltimore fell 55 percent in the quarter to just over $50 million, according to the report. The city saw seven deals in the quarter, but mostly early and seed stage investments led by Facet Wealth.

Tenable was a venture capital darling, drawing a $250 million investment from New York-based Insight Venture Partners and Silicon Valley-based Accel Partners in 2015. They remain the firm’s largest shareholders.

The company said it would put the proceeds of its IPO toward working capital, investing in sales and marketing, and furthering its international growth. Last year, Tenable announced it would build a new headquarters in downtown Columbia.